


Restraint

by stephanericher



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 12:30:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5585398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hux doesn't tear himself apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restraint

**Author's Note:**

> they're pretty despicable.

The tension that for so long has been holding Hux together has begun to tear him apart from the inside; like a bridge whose limits have been pushed again and again by wind he seems to almost be twisting himself to pieces. He’s an ugly vortex in the Force, an undercurrent humming everywhere, infecting everything, the pressure Hux is putting on himself trickling down through the officers as he barks orders to them louder, harsher, all the way to the lowliest troops. Whereas before he had demanded excellence but let the troops deliver that as they wished, he now watches over every meeting, every shred of security video, cuts negative slack, dissects and punishes every perceived mistake personally, breathing down their necks.

It’s bad enough that they hadn’t won this battle outright, but that the Republic fleets had pulled out new weapons none of the Order’s intelligence had caught wind of and shot down or severely crippled half of their best ships and that they’d barely been able to escape the onslaught has been like a slice through Hux’s gut. Ren’s always thought his pride needed to take a few hits, but he’d never thought that much about what exactly it would do to Hux, and certainly never imagined that it might triple his tense, paranoid micromanagement quite like this. It’s not right to feel this sort of boiling, muddled pot of emotions from Hux—seething, flashes of anger, quasi-tranquility, yes—but Hux always keeps everything separate behind reinforced walls, always in control.

This is not control. It’s the opposite, something that Ren is all-too-familiar with in his own mind, but from Hux it’s unnerving and toxic and wrong, and he can’t get away from the way it’s seeping into the walls and the Force itself, the way he can almost hear the sound of glass under pressure. It’s as if Hux sees everything spinning away from him, a satellite knocked out of orbit, and in an attempt to recapture it into his gravity he’s pushing it away and knocking himself off course and in a crash course toward the unknown.

* * *

Hux looks at Ren differently, too; his eyes are preoccupied and never sparking with the precision of returning a remark or a gesture in kind. They’ve barely had time alone since the battle (even counting the times they’ve walked back from visiting Snoke together, Hux’s jaw twitching with the tension of keeping itself clenched without breaking his teeth to shards) and Hux doesn’t even seem to want much.

The sex is horrible the few times they have it, sloppy and way too quick, Hux’s hands shaking and erratic and his teeth biting into Ren’s shoulder not with intensity or electricity but rather as a temporary grip, something for his body to hold onto while he tries his hardest not to explode. And Ren can’t push him there; Hux won’t let him. It might be making Hux even worse—it’s the opposite of a release for him, as if touching Ren is something he wants to get away from, something he won’t allow himself right now.

He never stays afterward; Ren always wakes up alone in a cold bed feeling disgustingly unsatisfied, irritation seeping into his skin like sand. Sometimes Ren briefly considers tearing something (anything ) up, but he’s never particularly angry and just doesn’t feel like it. It’s a different kind of feeling than a rush of anger, slowly clawing at something in the back of his mind, almost disconcerting in its foreignness.

And sometimes that won’t leave him alone and it builds up enough to set him off and make him forget the way Hux had looked at him all wrong.

* * *

“The coordinates. Just say them.”

Hux’s voice is loud and hoarse, bitten through his teeth, teetering on the edge. The Resistance spy glares back at him, pursing her lips. This is going nowhere. Just because Hux got here first doesn’t mean he should be the one interrogating her, especially with his hand that close to the safety on his blaster.

“Step aside, General.”

The spy’s neck twists half-voluntarily to look at him; he steps closer—with a snap of his hand, Ren releases the restrains on her chair—she falls out and he catches her in the air, clamps her arms behind her back. Her mouth opens in confusion and he steps closer still; the fear leaks from her like dirty rainwater from a flooded gutter.

“Where’s the base?”

She shakes her head.

“The sooner you tell us, the sooner this is over.”

He reaches forward, trying to pull it out—sifting through flimsy, idealistic minds like this is disgusting. He tries to yank it loose; her face is twisting. Now she’s actively trying not to think about it—it’ll come quick, and it does, images—an asteroid field, an old cruiser, a rusty B-wing—and there, stubby fingers punching in unfamiliar coordinates on a pad.

He drags the numbers forward with his hand.

“One, three, thirty-nine…”

As he recites them (loud enough for security footage to record, loud enough for Hux to memorize) each successive number becomes clearer, the image of the coordinates flashing on the screen rushing to the forefront of her mind. They hadn’t trained her how to lie at all—and if he didn’t know the Resistance as well as he does he’d say she was just a decoy.

Her face breaks; he doesn’t even need to feel the waves of despair and disappointment in the Force to know he’s extracted the right coordinates of the Resistance base. Fools, all of them—trusting stupid children (she can’t be more than twenty, if that) who crack like cheap display screens when he so much as taps them—how the Resistance has managed to survive this long is pure dumb luck. He pulls a few more threads in her mind; there’s nothing else important—even they wouldn’t trust her with classified information. She’s got no other purpose alive. He nods, just enough for Hux to catch the gesture, and Hux squeezes the trigger.

The motion is loud in the Force, the hatred burning in it like a star about to go supernova, for a second almost engulfing the room—and then he clamps down on it as the prisoner screams; Ren releases the force-hold on her arms as she falls to the floor, the blaster bolt piercing her heart and silencing her voice almost immediately. He looks back at Hux.

The barrel of the blaster has followed its target; his hand is shaking on the trigger as if he wants to pull it again—and again, and again, singeing holes into the body on the floor until she’s unrecognizable and the room reeks of burnt flesh and the blaster can no longer fire; Ren can feel the rage escaping from under the lid like steam through a vent almost as if it’s blasting right on his neck, the pressure of the hatred and the anger—they’re not well-contained but they’re pure, focused, intense in Hux’s usual dogmatic crush-the-resistance way.

Hux lowers the blaster and replaces it on his belt and then just as slowly raises his comlink to his lips.

“Sanitation.”

“Sir.”

“Dispose of the body.”

* * *

They confirm the coordinates within the hour; as the officers shout orders to set up tracking systems and fetch reports, Ren studies the map. Next to him, Hux is silent—his jaw is steady; his hand is far from his blaster. He still feels almost volatile in the Force, but in a different way now, a more familiar kind of picking himself up from the scattered pieces and reorganizing them the way he reorganizes fleets on a diagram, his mind moving faster than he can decide.

* * *

The tension lowers gradually to a simmer over the next few weeks; no one is taking any chances—but the few breaths of relief they allow themselves are met with no harsh punishment from Hux. He’s stopped sitting in on every meeting and started sleeping again; his Force presence is dropping to its baseline of stabilized tension; the cracks are slowly sealing up. He concerns himself chiefly with the collected information, allowing none of it to escape his hands but separating it out to different intelligence units to decode. Ren once again finds his company tolerable (sometimes more than that). His warm bed offsets the coldness of space (even with Hux’s refusal to install a heater in his room), and they’re drifting back toward their old routines together like moons briefly knocked out of proper orbit, reestablishing the balance between themselves and the universe.

Hux traces a finger over Ren’s shoulder, nail lightly scraping against the skin, between his freckles and the edges of the shadow, every motion measured to the micrometer. His feelings are once again perfectly separated, distilled into their components and concealed well enough inside him; he is in complete control again. He is precisely himself, the pad of his thumb brushing Ren’s chin as he closes his eyes, the sharp angles of his face softer in the low light. This is how it should be. Pushing away the swamp-water feelings that too often cloud his mind, Ren drags his foot up Hux’s ankle under the covers. For now, he’ll simply share in Hux’s restrained contentment.


End file.
